GOP proposing cuts to water quality programs

Macomb Daily file photo
Peyton Brozowski of Warren looks to pounce on the water spout at Lake St. Clair Metropark. Gov. Snyder’s plans to tout the state as “Pure Michigan” may take a hit if his fellow Republicans succed in cutting funds meant to ensure water quality.

A proposed state budget emerging in the state House would cut $700,000 for Great Lakes water quality programs from Gov. Snyder’s proposed spending plan for fiscal year 2014.

Those proposed cuts put $500,000 in matching federal funds at risk and seem to go against the Snyder administration’s “Pure Michigan” advertising campaign that seeks to lure tourists to the state’s vast lakeshore.

According to state Democratic Rep. Sarah Roberts of St. Clair Shores, the House Republicans are maneuvering to close the $200 million gap that would be created if the GOP succeeds in blocking Snyder’s bid to accept expanded Medicaid health care coverage for the poor under Obamacare.

“Why would we put the public’s health at risk?” Roberts said, referring to cuts planned for the Office of the Great Lakes and the Surface Water Quality Division.

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“This is the budget that provides the opportunity to truly protect our Pure Michigan way of life,” said Roberts, who previously worked for the Clean Water Action environmental group. “Cutting funding from programs to protect our Great Lakes, our water quality and our environment is extremely shortsighted and is completely counterintuitive to promoting Michigan as a place to travel and live.”

The Office of the Great Lake implements programs to protect, restore and sustain the Great Lakes, routinely working with Canadian officials on facilitating advancement of the pro-environment Great Lakes Compact.

The Surface Water Quality Program within the Department of Environmental Quality oversees the issuance of permits to discharge liquid materials into the waterways and polices the testing of beach water after sewage overflows.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee for DEQ spending recently approved the $700,000 cut. That reduction will be part of a much larger budget bill that the entire Appropriations Committee will consider for approval on April 10, after the Legislature’s Easter break.

At the same time, the elaborate drinking water monitoring system established several years ago to protect Lake St. Clair is falling into disarray. Relying upon high-tech monitoring equipment at each water intake along the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, the system was supposed to protect drinking water from Port Huron to Wyandotte.

In fact, it was hailed as the most advanced drinking water protection effort in the nation. Much of the initial, multimillion-dollar funding came from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

But five of the 13 communities that initially signed on to this state-of-the-art project have dropped out — Port Huron, St. Clair, East China Township, Algonac and Grosse Pointe Farms.

Officials hope to keep the system running — without some of the most technologically advanced equipment — through contributions by the remaining eight participants and Macomb and St. Clair counties.

Doug Martz, who served as the first and only chairman of the now-defunct Macomb County Water Quality Board, said that plans to ensure water quality dating back to the mid-1990s are now being scuttled by communities that refuse to participate on a financial basis.

Not only is Snyder’s Pure Michigan campaign at risk, Martz said, but Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel’s vision of a lake-based “Blue Economy” isin trouble based on the ecological troubles facing Lake St. Clair.

“Is it the Blue Economy or is it the brown economy or is it the green economy?” said Martz, a waterfront resident of Harrison Township.

“Mark Hackel has said it’s blue, I’ve said it’s brown. Based on what the water looks like in certain places, due to the water being so low and the weed problem, it now looks like a green problem.”